the last sane woman by hannah regel

the times literary supplemeent 16 august 2024

The arresting title of Hannah Regel’s first novel is a reference to the ceramicist Michael Cardew, whom the writer Angela Carter once described as “the Last Sane Man in a crazy world”. The phrase was later used by Tanya Harrod for her biography of Cardew, The Last Sane Man: Michael Cardew – Modern pots, colonialism and the counterculture (2012). Harrod described the book as “the story of one man’s attempt to live a creative life in the last century”, and, similarly, Regel’s novel is the story of two fictional women attempting to live a creative life: Donna Dreeman in the last century and Nicola Long now.

First we meet Nicola, who works as a “nursery nurse at a primary school in [London’s] Zone Three”. She too is a ceramicist, but declares to Marcella Goodwoman, the owner of Feminist Assembly, “a small, underfunded archive dedicated to women’s art”, that she wants “to read about women who can’t make things”. She continues: “I want to read about the trouble a person might have with making things. About what might stop a person from making things, making art, I mean. Like money … or time”. Goodwoman gives Nicola access to an archive of letters sent from Donna Dreeman, also a ceramicist, to her best friend, Susan Baddeley, in the 1970s and 1980s. The letters end when Dreeman takes her own life. Neither women achieves the success in pottery enjoyed by Cardew, and Regel offers plenty of reasons to explain why.

Perhaps most importantly, both are perpetually skint: Nicola resigns from the nursery, works briefly as a tutor and eventually claims Jobseeker’s Allowance. Donna worked as a waitress and lived in a squat. Nicola initially becomes enthralled by the letters, feeling, as she reads them, that she “wasn’t just overhearing, she was being overheard!” She soon worries, however, about the parallels between her own life and that of Dreeman: “the differences she’d been forced to concede were shrinking … They were getting closer”.

Regel was the co-editor of the feminist art journal SALT, and this is an avowedly feminist novel, not least in its centring of female experience, whether considering a stamp (“Diana on her wedding day, smiling into an unknowable left corner”) or describing a woman’s reflections on her torso: “the top of her skirt had bent back on itself to show the swell of her stomach in shiny M&S pants. small bow decorated their grip around her middle. The skin above, doughy and crinkled. Two large brown beauty spots and a dangling red cherry angioma”. This is a novel happily stuffed with female ephemera: leaks of menstrual blood; eyeliner badly applied; the tacky earrings of a cheating boyfriend’s other lover, found under the bed. Regel is also very good on the vernacular of women’s magazines and on female adolescence: “Being a teenage girl had always seemed to Nicola like some kind of esoteric angel cult, and she had tried, when it was her time, very hard to join it. She had bought magazines printed on thin, not quite glossy paper, with roll-on body glitter in plastic pouches attached to the covers. Inside, they told her fortune through horoscopes and flow charts. You are a shy person. You are a pear.” Unfortunately, the writing is not always this lucid, and it can veer into obscurity: “When they enter the pub, the relief is palpable: it knocks them off the polar bear’s back and sucks them into its innards, where the deep red Lincrusta ceiling looks ready to drip”. Similarly confusing are the shifts between different time periods, and comprehension is further undermined by its largish cast of fairly similar characters. And for readers who care about such things: nothing really happens. Yet I found it rather beautiful, and in its own, quiet way, radical.

This review originally appeared in The Times Literary Supplement